Where Is the Empathy for Somalia?

Zakariye Abdirisaq, left, whose father and aunt were among the hundreds killed in the Mogadishu truck bombing, is comforted by his cousin.

Photograph by Mohamed Sheikh Nor / AP

Over the weekend, a massive truck bomb
exploded in Mogadishu, the sprawling, once lovely capital of Somalia. The
explosives went off on a Saturday afternoon, in a busy intersection,
during a traffic jam, and killed an estimated three hundred people, at
least, and injured hundreds of others. First responders arrived to an
apocalyptic landscape: bodies burned beyond recognition (including a bus
of schoolchildren who were on their way home), buildings crumbled into
ash, survivors running away, relatives looking for loved ones, and a
zone of devastation the size of a few football fields. The attack in
Mogadishu inflicted a horror on its residents that has become
frighteningly common, as Al Shabaab, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, wages a
war for dominance. Somali government officials claim that the group
orchestrated the bombing. It is the most lethal terrorist attack that
Somalia has ever experienced.

And so it was with a familiar disappointment that Somalis, within the
country and among the diaspora, along with other concerned observers,
watched as details of the attack failed to headline broadcast news or
resonate globally on social media. There was no impromptu hashtag of
solidarity, no deluge of television coverage. It was as if the bombing
were just another incident in the daily life of Somalis—a burst of
violence that would fade into all the other bursts of violence. The lack
of public empathy was startling but not surprising.

There are good reasons, we tell ourselves, that we feel compassion more
easily for people who look like us, or live close to us, or share our
values. It’s easier to identify with them and to imagine their pain as
if it were our own. Empathy, then, for distant conflicts, especially
ones happening to African, Muslim people, is a stretch. But the stories
that are told about a place can enable, or disable, the ability to
empathize with those who reside there. News stories told about Somalia
are usually alienating; they convey the sense that the near-daily terror
attacks are more normal than the less frequent attacks in the West. The
implication is that people in Somalia, as a result, mourn differently or
with less intensity.

Most major news outlets did run articles on what happened, but, with a
few
exceptions,
most followed the same formula: a dispassionate recounting of the
explosion, similar to most news articles on major events. What is often
missing in the days following attacks in Somalia are the intimate
stories about the victims, the sense that real, breathing people were
affected, and that these catastrophes are neither normal nor expected.
With a place like Somalia, defined by stereotypes beyond its borders, it
has become acceptable to think of the country as holding only war and
extremism, and to forget that the lives there are multilayered,
possessing similar and universal concerns, interests, and desires.
“Empathy requires inquiry as much as imagination,” Leslie Jamison writes
in “The Empathy Exams.” “Empathy requires knowing you know nothing.”

Somalis told their own stories. Some put together a crowdfunding drive
to help support first responders. Others collected and then shared the
photos and the aspirations of the missing:

And many simply
asked:
Where was the outpouring of sympathy for a disaster that had occurred in
one of the world’s most marginalized countries? Were these people’s tragedies too
marginal to grieve?

Empathy is a fragile viewpoint: it’s potentially a humanizing way of
looking at a person who is both different and distant from you, and
potentially a means of ignoring the complexities that make up those
differences in an effort to relate. If empathy doesn’t lead you to
flatten the experiences of the people whom you are trying to understand,
though, it can feel radical—a chance to bypass stereotypes and make your
own judgments based on perceptiveness and sensitivity. It’s what the
people of Somalia deserve as they mourn those who died, cherish those
who survived, and find ways, as always, to get on with the business of
living.